In Africa, art has always been a part of the people
Jerry
Buhari holds a Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) of the Ahmadu Bello University,
Zaria. He has had three solo shows and has taken part in 38 group shows and
seven international exhibitions. A member of several professional associations,
he teaches art at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, where he was formerly Dean,
Faculty of Environmental Design. He is a fellow of The Pan-African Circle of
Artists. His interests border on creating works that raise issues on man's
relationship with his environment, dialogue of cultures and the challenges of
political leadership in modern African nations. In this interview with SEGUN
ORUAME and HALIMA MUSA, Buhari speaks on African art form as an expression of
the spiritual and material essence of the people. He sees contemporary arts as
embodying the political and economic experiences of a continent in transition.
Art and society must constantly dialogue for a deeper capturing of the relevance
of art to society, he says this quiet late evening inside his Zaria home where
the interview held
As a scholar and an artist, do you consider art as still relevant
in a depressed economy like ours?
Sometimes to answer such basic and fundamental questions, you need
to understand the nature of art and to what extent we can agree or
disagree on what is our perception about art. If we agree or
disagree about what art is then it now gives us a basis to answer
the question. For in stance, if you say that art is a bourgeoisie
vocation or a commodity then it simply rules out the majority of the
people because the elite class in every society constitutes a
minority group. A small clique if you like. Therefore, if you are
looking at relevance in terms of spread you will it is relevant to a
small group of people who consume it or who appreciate or who enjoy
it. So to that extent you can say that relevance is very exclusive.
But if you are looking at art as a human engagement or endeavor that
has evolved through out the history of mankind and you are trying to
see how this evolution came about and what function it played then I
think you are also looking at the role of art, the function of art
in a more holistic way. And perhaps, you are also looking at art
through a deeper lens than employing a peripheral evaluation of the
role of art. For example, you may look at art as a basis to study
the evolution of man. If you look at the history of Paleolithic man,
why did man find it necessary to draw animals on the caves of his
dwellings? What is the role of the paintings on the caves of man?
Why did an find it necessary or important to design the arrows that
he used to shoot his game? Why did man decide to embellish the pots
that contain the water, the food and other things that he used as
containers? Why was it necessary to embellish the pot if it was just
simply going to be a container of stuffs that are very functional?
Our attempt to answer these questions will begin to give you a
clearer perception of the role of art in the history of
mankind and how art indeed for me represents the beginning of the
understanding of technology in human civilization.
Anthropologists have been able to do very thorough studies of cave
paintings and drawings and engravings and through a very detailed
analysis of the people that lived in the Paleolithic period, they
were able to deduce that the drawings on the wall were an attempt to
arrest and subdue the game before they went out to hunt. So it was
that the ability of the Paleolithic man to capture faithfully a bull
on the wall of his caving granted him power to go out and hunt this
game and subdue it in reality. So you see that there are two forces
at play .there is the psychological force with which we all know we
use in executing warfare. There is also the component which is
physical when we set out to do the actual war physically. If we
agree with the anthropologists that that was the role of those
paintings then you can see that art gave man an insight into
the development of technology of warfare. Let me take you through a
very quick summary of how art evolved. When man came down from his
cave dwellings and began to build houses, the next thing he engaged
himself in was casting. He found metals and stones outside the
caves. He used stones to make weapons as flints and then arrows to
hunt animals. He also used metals that he found to create implements
for farming and other forms of activity. He began to make pots but
perhaps most importantly, you can disagree with me, he perceived in
the objects that he saw forms and images that he can formulate; that
he can mould or make to help him understand life and that gave birth
to what you today call religion. Now, these evolutions may not
simply be metals and stones and irons and wheels but they are what
you call the transcendental objects that led to the evolution of
what you today call technology; creativity, the quest for knowledge,
curiosity: these are the elements that propelled development not the
cars that you see. The simple mind just looks at the car but what
brought about the car is curiosity, technology, creativity; the
desire to bring into being what has never been before.
In other words, art itself is the product of deep thinking. I am
getting to the point where we can now ask whether the society
appreciates you as an artist. Does the society appreciate art? The
Nigerian society over the years has evolved in appreciating art. In
other words, you could do a mural and it will fetch a good reward
from the society. I just finished a mural in the Senate House and I
was paid an incredible figure that a man on the street will say this
is crazy. Why will you pay for ordinary stones that are stuck on the
wall? Over the years art has evolved but you should also remember
that the history of art in Nigeria has two parallel growths. We have
the art that is traditional which grew with us and our history which
we didn’t call art: you know our dancers, masquerades, textiles,
pottery, jewelry, and bronzes - they evolve in our culture
prior to the coming of the white man. These so called arts were not
extricated or different from the very life of the people. They
didn’t have a life of their own outside of the people. The concept
of appreciation of art outside of the people came into being when
Europeans called it art and separated it from the people. For
example, the pot that my grandmother made was a major component of
marriage in my culture. In many African cultures if a woman is going
to be sent to her home one of the items that goes with that ceremony
is that pot and the pot represents gifts that are to ensure that the
marriage works. There are different types of pots. There is a pot
used purely as a container for goods. There are pots that are
spiritual. They have spiritual function. The young bride keeps the
pot in her house as a reminder of the vows that she has made
or the ceremony that led to the conjugal relationship that was
established. This pot has direct relationship between her people and
the people who married her so the pot becomes not just a container
of things but an object that cements this marriage that has just
been established. When a masquerade comes out in a village square it
is said that there is a disease, a plaque that has overtaken the
land and you need to consecrate that land because of the defilement
that has been brought as a result of certain things that are
happening in the society. When this masquerade comes out it is seen
to perform a cleansing ceremony and the people actually experienced
cleansing whether you believe it or not. We can go on and on to show
that art was in the people and not an external thing. Then you have
the drummers. The drum that is made; the songs that are sung in the
town square all together are part and parcel of the evolution of the
people; it brings about peace, it deals with issues of conflict and
resolution; issues of governance, it deals with the issue of law and
order in the society and the punishment of those who have
committed wrong. We call them objects of art now for the purpose of
connecting with the present times. The coming of the Europeans
helped to separate art from the people. But then, art has always
been a part of the people.
So what’s gone wrong? Is it that there has been a disconnection
between us and where we are coming from or that where we are coming
from is the reason why we fail to appreciate what art is or that or
art has taken on a form that is so abstract and t that even the best
brain among us cant appreciate it?
I will say yes and no. Yes because when the European culture brought
its own type of art it was different. We can say that it is
different in its medium and presentation from our type of art. In
art, fundamentally, there are no differences in essence. The
differences are in form but not many people know this fact. I
remember setting a question in an exam and asking whether there was
painting in Africa before the coming of the white man; all the
students answered and said there wasn’t. Their perception of
painting is an art work that is done on canvas, mounted on a three
legged isle and using artist colors that comes in tubes so you could
say that if you saw painting like that then painting wasn’t in
Nigeria or Africa before the coming of the white man. But that’s not
true because our dancers would adorn their body with paint so the
body was a canvas and this canvas is not dead and static and
stuck on the wall; this canvas is dynamic, it moves, it vibrates to
the drums and to the songs and you can see that it is a holistic
expression. So the painting didn’t exist on its own. It exists in
unison or in dialogue with music, singing and drumming and of course
an audience that is interactive because the people clap and they
shout. The disconnect is when we took on the western form of art
which I practice, which I was schooled in; there was the need to
take art back to the society; to repackage art to the society; to
tell them that there is really no difference between this painting
and the painting that you do on the body and on the pots and on
clothes. What really varies is that this one hangs on the wall. One
canvas is static the other one dynamic or human.
Literally what you have been trying to say is that art is trying
to communicate emotionally or physically to help people
understand life itself. Can you then apply the saying as it is used
in theatre, that art for sake of art cannot really exist in
contemporary context, what is applicable is art for development?
If art cannot communicate our experiences as we used to know it, may
be that’s why the ordinary man can’t relate with it. The
ordinary man can relate with religion so we find the Christian
will carry may be the Catholic the image of Mary. The artists have
to come to term with art for development for the ordinary man.
Art that can make people to believe in their idea such as the
idea of national unity can speak to the ordinary man in the language
of politics. Contemporary art has been speaking to issues of
development and issues that concern the society. In the sense
of the Nigerian art, what we have not been able to see is the
ability of the artist to come down to the society so that the
society can have that dialogue or for the society to go up to
the artist so the society can see that the artist has always been
addressing the issues of development, issues of human concern. Let
me give you an example. We have evolved as a country from a
political history that has never grown out of a populace
constituency. The longest period of our political history has to do
with soldiers that did not seek anybody’s mandate to rule.
When you have a country that has gone through a history of
misrule where the who gun rather than the ballot represents the
voice of consent for the articulation of leadership you find a major
disconnect that simply goes beyond the ability for us to speak
and understand the same language. Artists have in their works
and a most simple way told how fundamental our problem of leadership
is. There are artists who have created work that sought to
address fundamental issues of corruption in this country during
Abacha and Babangida’s regime. These paintings and art works were
exhibited in the biggest and most visible gallery in Lagos because
Lagos is the cultural or art centre in Nigeria. The president
and other members of the political leadership of this country
went to the gallery and said these are beautiful pictures; they
never saw through the messages coming out of the citizens
criticizing their government. There was a case of an artist
who did a painting titled ‘Lethal Envelope,’ the idea of that artist
was to present the gory picture of how modern technology is
used to annihilate the voice of freedom in Nigeria’s
representatives. It was during Babangida’s period that a letter bomb
was used to kill Dele Giwa. An artist created a large painting
and he received an incredible newspaper review but what actually
happened at the end of the day was that one of Babangida’s
family members quickly bought the painting and made sure it was out
of circulation. The question now is: has the painting made
relevance? Yes! It has to the extent that it has challenged a very
dangerous development in the annihilation of the voices of freedom
and has instigated a response in the way it was seen. For two weeks,
that particular painting became a subject of discussion in the
press so there is a sense to which I can say that art has
continued through history to create relevance in Nigeria. In Ahmadu
Bello University here, there is a certain artist called Muazu Sani.
In the period of religious clashes between Islam and
Christianity in northern Nigeria, Muazu Sani, a Muslim decided
to do a painting that sought religious tolerance and understanding
among the two religions. He did a simple painting in which
there was a man holding a cross saying I love Jesus and there
was another guy holding Tasbih and a sign of the minaret, the
Christian saying I love Mohammed and that work was exhibited
in the Kashim Ibrahim Library in Kaduna. It attracted so much
angst from the Muslim community that the library was closed down for
two weeks. I don’t know what you will read if you saw that art work
as generating crisis; if that’s what you prefer to see then of
course art didn’t play its role. It was misinterpreted as art
designed for mischief. Muazu Sani had to be taken into hiding
because they said they were going to kill him. But a month after
that, we began to talk with the Muslim students and the
community and suddenly some of them began to say hey this guy is
not insulting our religion, he is calling for peace and tolerance.
The work is not therefore mischievous. This is the kind of
role art has played over the years in the world.
An engineer builds a bridge that connects two villages together and provides them with transport across the water in the rainy season so their agricultural produce can go across. This is a very tangible relevance or item of development that you can relate to but art deals with such item that are transcendental; items that speak to development of value which is perhaps more important than the physical values. Therefore, the idea of art for art sake is a theory existing only in the old text books; there is really nothing as art for arts sake. Art has always served very definite and specific functions either as a physical function or as transcendental function arts that speaks to values and art that puts food in the stomach.
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